A week ago, another Palestinian teenager was shot in the neck by Israeli occupation forces in the village of Burqa, near Nablus in the northern West Bank.

A local official said 16-year-old Muhyi al-Din Abed al-Rahman Salah was injured with a live bullet when Israeli soldiers “ambushed youths” near the entrance to the village, Ma’an News Agency reported.

The youth was taken to a hospital in Nablus for treatment of moderate injuries.

Indiscriminate violence

This violent start to the new year for Palestinian children follows a year of systematic abuses by Israeli occupation forces.

In a review of 2017, Defense for Children International-Palestine said that there were “no signs of abatement in Palestinian children’s vulnerability to injury and abusive military arrest in the West Bank.”

Israeli forces routinely kill Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip while enforcing the 50-year old military occupation.

According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, regulations meant to restrict the use of live ammunition to life-threatening situations are systematically ignored by Israeli forces with impunity, which has resulted in the deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

B’Tselem calls this widespread and indiscriminate use of lethal force “a crucial element in Israel’s ability to maintain violent control over millions of Palestinians.”

In 2016, B’Tselem stopped cooperating with Israeli military investigations into such killings, calling them “a system that whitewashes investigations and serves as a fig leaf for the occupation.”

Protests mark Ahed Tamimi’s birthday

In an emotional poem on Facebook, Ahed’s father Bassem Tamimi writes of the pain of his daughter’s absence from the family’s home on her birthday, and of his pride in her courage in the face of Israel’s persecution.

Ahed was detained in a night raid from her home in the occupied West Bank village of Nabi Saleh days after a video circulated showing her and her cousin Nour slapping and shoving two heavily armed Israeli soldiers following an incident in which a soldier shot in the head and seriously injured their 15-year-old cousin.

“Nothing that Ahed Tamimi has done can justify the continuing detention of a 16-year-old girl,” Amnesty International stated earlier this month. “The Israeli authorities must release her without delay.”

Last week, a group of French academics and intellectuals published a letter in Le Monde focusing on Ahed’s case and calling for an end to Israel’s military detention of children.

“We urge President Emmanuel Macron to take action urgently to contact the Israeli authorities to finally end their detention practices that violate children’s rights, human rights and international law,” the statement says.

And Canadian lawmaker Hélène Lavardière wrote to her country’s foreign minister raising Ahed’s case.